Information Age
MARJORIE P. LACAP, Ph.D.
Intended Learning Outcomes
At the end of this section, the students should be able to:
1. trace the development of the information age from the introduction
of Guttenberg press up to the era of social media;
2. determine the impacts of the information age to society; and
3. analyze the ways in which information age and social media influence
human lives.
Information Age
• German goldsmith, Johannes Gutenberg, invented the
printing press around 1440.
• This invention was a result of finding a way to improve the
manual, tedious and slow printing methods.
• A printing press is a device that applies pressure to an
inked surface lying on a print medium, such as cloth or
paper, to transfer ink.
• Gutenberg hand mold printing press led to the creation of
metal movable type. Later, the two inventions were
combined to make printing methods faster and they
drastically reduced the costs of printing documents.
Information Age
• The beginnings of mass communication can be traced back to the invention
of the printing press.
• The development of a fast and easy way of disseminating information in the
print permanently reformed the structure of society.
• Political and religious authorities who took pride in being learned were
threatened by the sudden rise of literacy among people.
• With the rise of the printing press, the printing revolution occurred which
illustrated the tremendous social change brought by the wide circulation of
information.
• The printing press made the mass production of books possible which made
books accessible not only to the upper class.
Information Age
As years progressed,
calculations became involved
in communication due to the
rapid developments in the
trade sector.
Back then, people who
compiled actuarial tables and
did engineering calculations
served as “computers.”
Information
Age
• During World War II, the Allies (U.S., Canada, Britain, France, USSR, Australia,
etc.), countries that opposed the Axis powers (Germany, Japan, Italy, Hungary,
Romania, and Bulgaria), were challenged with a serious shortage of human
computers for military calculations.
• When soldiers left for war, the shortage got worse, so the United States
addressed the problem by creating the Harvard Mark 1, a general-purpose
electromechanical computer that was 50 feet long and capable of doing
calculations in seconds that usually too people hours.
• At the same time, Britain needed mathematicians to crack the German Navy’s
Enigma code.
• The Enigma was an enciphering machine that the German armed forces used
to securely send messages.
Information Age
• Alan Turing, an English
mathematician, was hired in 1936 by
the British top-secret Government
Code and Cipher School at Bletchley
Park to break the Enigma code.
• His code-breaking methods became
an industrial process having 12,000
people working 24/7.
Information Age
• To counteract this, the Nazis made the
Enigma more complicated having
approximately 10114 possible
permutations of every encrypted
message.
• Turing, working on the side of the Allies,
invented Bombe, an electromechanical
machine that enabled the British to
decipher encrypted messages of the
German Enigma Machine.
• This contribution of Turing along with other
cryptologists shortened the war by two
years (Munro, 2012).
Information Age
• In his paper On Computable Numbers, with an
Application to the Entscheidungsproblems, first
published in 1937, Turing presented a theoretical
machine called the Turing machine that can solve any
problem from simple instructions encoded on a paper
tape.
• He also demonstrated the simulation of the Turing
machine to construct a single Universal Machine. This
became the foundation of computer science and the
invention of a machine later called a computer, That
can solve any problem by performing any task from a
written program (DeHaan, 2012).
Information Age
• In the 1970’s, the generation who witnessed the dawn of computer age was described as the
generation with “electronic brains”.
• The people of this generation were the first to be introduced to personal computers (PCs).
• Back then, the Homebrew Computer Club, an early computer hobbyist group, gathered
regularly to trade parts of computer hardware and talked about how to make computers more
accessible to everyone.
• Many members of the club ended up being high-profiled entrepreneurs, including the Apple
Inc. In 1976, Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Inc., develop the computer that made him
famous: the Apple I.
• Wozniak designed the operating system, hardware and circuit board of the computer all by
himself. Steve Jobs, Wozniak’s friend, suggested to sell the Apple I as a fully assembled
printed circuit board. This jumpstarted their career as founders of Apple Inc.
Information Age
From 1973 onward,
• social media platforms were introduced from variations of multi-user chat rooms; instant-messaging applications. (e.g.,
AOL, Yahoo messenger, MSN messenger, Windows messenger);
• Bulletin-board forum systems, game-based social networking sites (e.g., Facebook, Friendster, Myspace) and
• business-oriented social services (e.g., Xing);
• messaging, video and voice calling services (e.g., Viber, Skype);
• blogging platforms, image and video hosting websites (e.g., Flicker);
• discovery and dating-oriented websites (e.g., Tagged, Tinder);
• video sharing services (e.g., Youtube);
• real-time social media feed aggregator (e.g., Friend Feed);
• live-streaming (e.g., [Link], [Link]);
• photo-video sharing websites (e.g., Pinterest, Integral, Snapchat, Keek, Vine); and
• question and answer platform (e.g., Quora). To date these social media platforms enables information exchange at its
most efficient level.
Information Age
• This information age, which progress from the invention of the
printing press to the development of numerous social media
platforms, has immensely influence the lives of the people.
• The impact of these innovations can be advantageous or
disadvantageous depending on the use of these technologies.
